


Walls

by StrayLiger



Category: Gundam 00
Genre: Character Study
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-26
Updated: 2018-09-26
Packaged: 2019-07-18 00:53:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 913
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16107362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StrayLiger/pseuds/StrayLiger
Summary: Neil Dylandy, now Lockon Stratos, is a master at building walls.





	Walls

**Author's Note:**

> This "study" is like 98% me projecting onto Neil Dylandy after having a bad day and 2% actual character study. 
> 
> It just irks me a lot when people compare the Dylandy twins and talk of Neil as if he was perfect-it's an awful burden to put on a person, I think.

Neil knows, has always known, that his biggest addiction isn’t cigarettes, or cheap whisky, or the stupid gummy bears he keeps stashed in the cockpit (he started taking them on missions, after Ian announced, much to his dismay, that if he smoked again inside the Dynames he would throw him out of the airlock).

No, what Neil’s truly addicted to, the one thing he can’t live without, is anger.

Pure, unadulterated anger. Red hot, searing anger, something that he learned he possessed when he was a lanky, weird looking twelve year old with bones that were still setting in their places and hormones that had just started to make things he’d considered solid and unwavering blur like a road in a heated afternoon. He never asked for it, but he had it. His father used to say that “he had a temper”, but Neil disliked it deeply.

He hated the way it made everything look red, took the air out of his lungs and made his fists shake. The way Amy seemed to sense it before it happened, like cats do with storms, and avoided him. And mostly, the fact that Lyle never seemed to have that problem-even when angry, his twin brother seemed calm. It wasn’t in his personality to lose his cool, apparently. Unlike Neil, Lyle didn’t seem to have to make physical efforts to avoid raising his voice or punch walls.

How everyone ended up thinking so highly of him, Neil will never understand. As far as he’s concerned, Lyle is the only one of the two who ever had it together.

Now, as an adult, he is better at hiding it. Not controlling it-how do you control something so big and primordial as the feeling of being burned alive from the inside?-but hiding it. Neil Dylandy, now Lockon Stratos, is a master at building walls, and in them he keeps hidden, locked in an air-tight compartment, the rage that sometimes manages still to make him grit his teeth so hard it makes them squeak, like when he was a kid. Inside his chest, anger swells constantly, beating like another heart-an infected, feverish heart that pumps sickness through his veins.

He has grown used to it enough that people around him legitimately believe he’s a cool, laid back guy. It’s almost funny.

Almost.

He hates that he can’t get rid of it. As much as he dislikes it, it’s part of him. No, not only part of him. He is his anger, as much as the ocean is water. He hates that as much as he despises his anger, he can’t imagine himself without it, because it’s been there always, and when he lost everything and pushed everyone away, it was the only thing that remained. Like a haunted home, in which a poltergeist continues to throw things around even after the family is gone.

Shortly after the explosion that reduced their family to ashes, Neil and Lyle had been forced to see a therapist. They went to two sessions, of two hours each, before they both found excuses to stop going, unable to withstand having their feelings thrown at their faces and dissected like frogs on a tray. Neil only remembered one thing, something about stages of grief. One of them was anger. It was easier than to move on, it gave him something to hang on to, and he kept it for the rest of his life.

When he started to feel comfortable with the low gravity on the Ptolemy, and stopped missing the earth under his feet, when Sumeragi observed that his thick accent has started disappearing, when he realized that he couldn’t recall Amy’s face without looking at the pictures he kept stashed away in his drawer, when he noticed that his brain insisted on responding to Lockon Stratos and he felt everything he used to be starting to be washed away-anger was everything he had left.

(After Sumeragi’s comment, he pretends to laugh, speaks for a bit in an exaggerated irish accent to make Feldt laugh, and when he comes back to his cabin -airtight, soundproof, isolated-, he punches the wall until his knuckles bleed, until there’s a visible dent on the matte aluminum.)

Neil has always known that he’s good at pretending, and he’s particularly good at pretending he can contain his anger; but it takes less than a second for the walls he’s built to come down, and even less for the anger that he thinks he has controlled to absolutely take over.

He understands something now.

It’s something he wishes he had realized long before, preferably not during a fight with his life on the line, missing one eye and with a haro for only support. But it’s already too late. It’s always like that, with anger: always too late to try and hold back, to think before speaking, to apologize for it.

All he needs to let go, he realizes then, is an excuse, a scapegoat: his parents, Amy, the KPSA, his brother, Tieria, Setsuna, Sumeragi, Ali Al-Saachez.

How ridiculous, he thinks. How could a man that couldn’t even change that about himself change the world? As he floats upside down in the void, feeling darkness creep around the edge of his vision, and points his finger at the blue sphere that floats in space like an eyeball, he understands.

The person he is angriest at, in the end, the reason why he couldn’t let go, was himself all along.


End file.
